As a newcomer to high-end printing I was surprised and disappointed to find that use of the correct paper/printer profiles was not enough to prevent slightly different paper colours affecting the print colouration.

Using an ESP 9900 with, first, Epson Photo Quality Inkjet, then Velvet Fine Art, to make a copy of an oil painting. I spent ages in Lightroom, making test prints on the PQIJ paper, then having gotten quite a good match, switched to the VFA, to find an obvious colour cast, apparently due to the warmer colour of the paper. It looks like I'll have to use the same paper for test prints as for the final one from now on, but shouldn't profiles, at least ones from the maker of printer, ink and paper, take care of that? Maybe I'm just too idealistic.

Robin, I may disappoint you by pointing out the blindingly obvious, but the whole point of having different papers is to make the subsequent prints look different (paper profiles and softproofing notwithstanding).

Thats why one experiments to decide what papers one wants to print with: gloss vs matte, cold vs warm, paper vs canvas etc.Experienced printers normally have a favourite gloss (or semi gloss) paper, a matte paper, and a canvas type that by trial and error they have discovered works for their aesthetic tastes.They also have discovered that certain types of images work best printed on certain types of media as opposed to others.

There is a lot of science to getting excellent prints but also a lot of art, and black art at that.

A cheaper paper that has an almost identical paper white compared to VFA (and Photorag, German Etching, etc) is the Canon USA Premium Matte 210gsm. Falls in the CAD qualities and may be obsolete right now, was only available in North America. Some ads show a much lower price now. While it has a similar paper white the ink itself can still behave differently on its paper coating and deliver another gamut.Epson Enhanced Matte 190gsm or whatever it is called now is also better than your choice of proof paper. Slightly cooler though.

Paper profiles describe the color gamut of a specific ink printed with a specific driver media preset on one paper only. The rendering choices fit the image in different ways in that color gamut based on the image's color space. If all the image colors fall within both the paper profiles gamut then a choice for relative or absolute colormetric rendering could make the prints more alike but usually that is not the case and one selects perceptual or relative colormetric to get a nicer image that will not represent the original totally but is at least in harmony in itself.

Tony: of course I appreciate that different papers make for different-looking prints, I just hadn't expected print colour to be so much affected by paper colour. Now I know!

Ernst: thanks for this info, not that I entirely understand it ATM but I'm learning as I go along. I'm looking at using a cheaper paper for both test and final prints that unlike the Epson Fine Art papers is available in A4: Innova. Reproduction of paintings being what I'm focussing on ATM, closest possible colour matching is vital.